Cinderella
by Nerumi H
Summary: Glass shoes and ugly sisters. / Dark!Elsa, frozen!Anna.


**.title.:** Cinderella

**.summary.:** Glass shoes and ugly sisters

**.characters.:** Elsa - Hans - Statue!Anna

**.a/n.:** For Iceburns Week on tumblr! I'm hoping to get the rest done, I had big plans for Monster and Prisoner, but I've been soooo busy this Spring Break so they'll likely all be fairly late, sigh. Anyhow. This focuses a lot on Anna and their relationship to her, as even with dark!Helsa, I feel like Anna is the thing that brings and keeps them together...she really is the center of everyone's universe.

Enjoy!

**X**

He often tells Elsa to get rid of her. From a comment nudged in edgewise through their evening banter, to opaquely telling her right in her face, _that statue has got to go_ – he's either, over time, gained confidence in how much he can push her, or he's just _that_ disgusted with its presence.

She supposes it would make sense if he didn't like it. Or, it would, if he had a speck of guilt left in his body to make him feel anything but triumphant about its existence.

Perhaps his regret is as unconscious and infernal as her own.

It's late, late at night when Elsa retires from bed to rediscover Anna's corpse. She's feeling a low tug in her chest, a pulse from the husk where her heart has emptied, and she abandons Hans's soft snoring and a far-too-warm room to find her sister.

Anna's frozen body stands in what was once a young Elsa's bedroom. She's before the window, and from outside, looks merely like a blistered mirror fluttering between the drapes. But here she presents herself to the doorway so Elsa can see exactly what Anna once was whenever she enters.

Her arm desperately reaching, her knees knocked, cape and skirt in an open whirl around her like a piteously premature flower in bloom. Her face is carved in smooth contours and a blank expression of realisation, of tumbling down the rabbit hole and terribly mute, like she knew in the very last moment that she was _finished_, for the sake of a woman who would turn her back on her as quickly as, thirteen years ago, she slammed a door. Elsa wonders at times if this petrified instant is the second where she regretted it, or understood that maybe, maybe, Elsa is alright this way.

"Maybe you thought nothing at all as usual," she says, but the uncaring tone falls flat. It's something Hans is accidentally teaching her – a far more subtle, more threatening way of retelling the same lesson her father once preached.

She lets her fingers hover on her sister's face. Under the glossy surface, the sharp edges of buried snowflakes twist and writhe to their wielder's proximity. Anna's frozen all the way through, not a twitch of blood or muscle or the fragments of a wandering soul underneath the ice, from the tips of her threaded braids to her tiny, glass shoes.

Here, it makes Elsa feel like they're alone together forever, but what a terrible, selfish world that would be – how the sisters would ruin it. Trying to protect each other didn't work so well the first time, after all.

The door clicks open.

Elsa turns. It's Hans, obviously. Moving straight on into the room, there's no need to assess any scene: she's been caught here plenty of times before; it can hardly even be considered a crime anymore.

"Go back to bed," she says immediately, but he hesitates none. She doubts he was asleep at all when she left.

"Are you waiting for her to wake up, Elsa?" Hans asks when he's at her side.

They're both looking at the form of what was once her sister. Elsa's muscles briefly seize at the imagery: both Anna's murderers standing before her like a festival spectacle.

She answers, "There isn't anything for her to wake up from."

He moves, maybe to touch Anna, and Elsa hurriedly continues in a voice constrained, "Unless, perhaps, a most terrible dream."

He huffs softly; that movement completes itself with a hand hovering on her high waist. "Leave this be. You're going to make yourself crazy."

"Answer me only this. Why do you hate her?"

Though she doesn't look away from Anna to see his face, she enjoys the honesty in his sigh, one that says he doesn't have a proper answer, at least, not one he wants to share openly, out of dignity rather than theatre. Being reserved and being a façade hold a difference she can recognise in the both of them from the time Anna was around: Hans lied to hurt her, Elsa held her tongue to save her, but those lies are (gratefully) no more.

At least, with this girl carving them open from where she stands still and dead, they're relearning how to properly stay alive.

"It's morbid," he finally answers, voice scraping in irritation.

She agrees. She agrees that it's strange, and awful, and secret, a lovely little secret all on her own that she keeps her sister's body and it will never leave the way she once feared when Elsa was hurt and stupid. It's a mirage of what she was before: a sister of mistakes, of guilt.

"Do you hate her because that terrible dream," Elsa intones softly, "could be a replay of the moment you left her in the library, pleading and alone?"

He emits a single beat of laughter. He jerks gently on her waist again, making to leave; she stands stiff. She's opened her imagination for herself and it burns on the way past her lips, but it's better than the frigid breeze floating off of the corpse.

She says, "I suppose she begged for you to return, like you could explain it all away and make her happy again."

Hans snaps. "Are you trying to do the same to her now?"

Elsa folds her hands before her, stare going empty over the frozen girl. The last time she saw her this clearly, she was pleading through a snowstorm, like a song could fix things. Perhaps it could in Anna's perfect world, one where she can ignore problems until they dissolve into sunlight and a minor burn where she cannot see. While Elsa held all her sister's aches so close in her chest, that they eventually left no space for a heart.

She sighs, a trifle amused. "You often can't read me this well, Hans."

He gathers her into a turn, finally ripping Anna out of her gaze. She stares into his face and how disturbingly earnest the annoyance is, while Anna's distressed expression floats above the thrum of his voice in her ears: "I don't want her to bother you anymore."

She smirks shallowly. "You don't want her to bother yourself."

He avoids that and instead digs deeper into her: "She isn't going to love you like she used to. You missed your chance; there's no terrible dream, she's just gone and no matter how long you wait, she isn't coming back for you."

She feels he's speaking from his own anxieties, and wants to step in saying she can love him the way Anna did, and she _is_, but she knows that isn't true, just because she doesn't care enough to say it. He's upsetting her on purpose. It's working. She tightens her hands together.

His words can understand her, even if he, so often, makes it obvious that _he_ doesn't. That is enough of a comfort, though. His darkness, and the frigidity he brings out in her, chips away the remnants of her sister in her chest, bit by bit by bit.

"You've been tortured long enough by her, Elsa."

She watches him cross the room, hover, scan, and finally pick up a candelabra. It's obviously one replaced in the room after the fact, for it's far too hefty for her young self's tastes, but he wields it with a sort of demented grace.

He's right. He's always been right about the statue, and deep, deeper than her guilt, she has been too.

Anna's right, too. Elsa's better this way.

"To think, if things had gone differently, you could have had my bloodless head on your mantle instead of this…"

He looks at her, the candelabra wielded high, as if for confirmation. He's so obedient, because he doesn't quite know how to play her, but she can see the furious twitches of his arms, the way his gaze breaks a little too early. The glass of Anna glints their reflections weakly. And somewhere, somewhere in the castle, a clock strikes twelve.

He swings.


End file.
